Samsung mass produces DDR4—which still has nowhere to go

Samsung announced today that it is mass producing DDR4 RAM modules in 16GB and 32GB capacities, following news that 16GB modules were being sampled back in July 2012. Samsung boasts that its modules support up to 2667Mbps transfer speeds and that the 4Gb DDR4 memory chips used by the modules lower power consumption by 30 percent relative to comparable DDR3 chips.

As we've written before, any speed increases promised by DDR4 won't make their way into servers or PCs until memory controllers begin to support them. Since today's memory controllers are integrated into the CPUs themselves, we'll need to wait for new processors before we can get new memory. Intel's Haswell-E server CPUs, due in 2014, are the company's first announced processors to support DDR4, and there's no word on whether its next-generation "Broadwell" chips for consumer PCs will support the standard. AMD has yet to announce its own plans for DDR4 support.

Samsung's modules use 4Gb (512MB) chips manufactured at 20nm, the same process being used to make its current low-power "green DDR3." Neither 16GB nor 32GB memory modules are unheard of today (especially in server memory), but 32GB modules are rare and much more expensive than their 16GB counterparts. When DDR4 memory does finally hit servers (and in a more distant future consumer PCs, tablets, and phones), it may make these larger capacities more accessible than they are today.

The limitation for games like Crysis is 90% of the time your graphics card and its memory, not the memory in your machine.

So, if you want to get more FPS from Crysis, best thing to do is upgrade your power supply (most gaming-class graphics cards need at least a 400 watt power supply and most machines today come with a 300 watt) and graphics card.

The limitation for games like Crysis is 90% of the time your graphics card and its memory, not the memory in your machine.

So, if you want to get more FPS from Crysis, best thing to do is upgrade your power supply (most gaming-class graphics cards need at least a 400 watt power supply and most machines today come with a 300 watt) and graphics card.

Don't take your advice from this guy...

Seriously, a power supply for more fps? Do you work in a mine? What are you doing posting on Ars?

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

Power goes out - data is lost.

Not what you'd expect from a disk drive.

And there's plenty of free tools to create a RAM disk if you really want it that bad.

Given how badly memory bandwidth constrained your average PC is, I would expect a reasonable improvement in framerate with faster memory. Not everything happens in the GPU, and something like Crysis is probably too big to fit in cache, so you're going to be hitting main memory a lot, slowing your framerate.

Of course if you dropped these modules into your current rig, you would see exactly 0 FPS difference because your memory controller can't support them.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It is a cost-based reason, but not of the conspiracy you've described. Hard drives are dense but slow. Memory is expensive (ie, not dense) but fast. Also, the way memory works is that it needs constant voltage in order to maintain state, whereas hard disks, which are magnetic, hold their state for a long time even without energy input. What you describe is desirable but not yet quite feasible.

Given how badly memory bandwidth constrained your average PC is, I would expect a reasonable improvement in framerate with faster memory. Not everything happens in the GPU, and something like Crysis is probably too big to fit in cache, so you're going to be hitting main memory a lot, slowing your framerate.

Of course if you dropped these modules into your current rig, you would see exactly 0 FPS difference because your memory controller can't support them.

I'll refer you to Google, Anandtech, and the impact of memory bandwidth on non-apu (which you are referencing) gaming performance. (generally less than margin of error)

If you are running Crysis on your APU, though, this stuff is what is really needed. Especially for AMD.

I hope broadwell supports ddr4. When I built my current pc with ddr2 memory, ddr3 started to come out and became mainstream, making ddr2 so expensive. I don't want to run into that again with my next build only supporting ddr3 only to have ddr4 get supported in a few months

With no real controllers or chipsets to test on, I really hope the specifications don't change for DDR4, or these modules will have nowhere to go.

There is testing hardware to confirm that the dimms comply with the spec; and prior to the first DDR4 dimms sampling I assume Intel/Amd/Ibm/Oracle had hardware to simulate a DDR4 dimm to do preliminary validation of their chipsets. The spec itself was finalized a year ago.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It's worth pointing out that puppy linux does not keep the OS on the hard-drive, it loads it entirely into RAM, only using the hard drive as long term storage. But, as many others have said, RAM is wholly insufficient for long term storage.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It's worth pointing out that puppy linux does not keep the OS on the hard-drive, it loads it entirely into RAM, only using the hard drive as long term storage. But, as many others have said, RAM is wholly insufficient for long term storage.

not really because there are ways to configure it where it is interim storage this works very well for virtualization.

I hope broadwell supports ddr4. When I built my current pc with ddr2 memory, ddr3 started to come out and became mainstream, making ddr2 so expensive. I don't want to run into that again with my next build only supporting ddr3 only to have ddr4 get supported in a few months

Broadwell is going to be a BGA (mobile/soldered to the mobo) only chip. We desktop builders won't get a new CPU until 2015 when Skylake comes out (unless you count Haswell-E). While somewhat disappointing for anyone lusting after the newest and shiniest; it does make sense from Intel's perspective. The last few process shrinks didn't really offer much on the desktop but the increased power savings and bigger IGPs are a really big deal on mobile; so directing all their limited 14nm capacity there makes sense from a business standpoint.

Question since I haven't built a new comp in like 8 years now. Would this memory work fine in a modern MB just not get the full speed increase from DDR4 vs DDR3 or is it not backwards compatible.

Nope. DDR specs aren't back compatible; they differ in that each new revision doubles the ratio between the dram chip and bus clock speeds and uses wider multi-plexing to feed the faster bus (reading from more chips at once). Each generation is also integrating more of the analog hardware needed to keep the bus signals clean onto the dimms and dram chips themselves. While moving this closer to the termination points is needed to maintain signal quality at higher bus rates it comes at a cost. Analog components don't get significantly smaller when you do a process shrink; and so many have been moved onto the dram chips that with DDR3 they became majority analog chips by die area. If this is a good thing depends on if you look at it as meaning it doesn't take double the manufacturing cost to make a dimm twice as big; or that smaller dimms for budget systems don't get as big of a discount as would be expected from their lower capacity.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It is a cost-based reason, but not of the conspiracy you've described. Hard drives are dense but slow. Memory is expensive (ie, not dense) but fast. Also, the way memory works is that it needs constant voltage in order to maintain state, whereas hard disks, which are magnetic, hold their state for a long time even without energy input. What you describe is desirable but not yet quite feasible.

Would it be feasible with a constant, near guaranteed power source for the data, even if the mains is unplugged? As in, a battery that recharges itself while the system is on, gives warnings before it fails, and is easily replaced if it goes bad before your next upgrade?

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

Power goes out - data is lost.

Not what you'd expect from a disk drive.

And there's plenty of free tools to create a RAM disk if you really want it that bad.

You miss my point. A RAM disk still operates in the confines of the current bus system. I want a hybrid device that takes the responsibility of both the memory and the hard drive and puts it in one package, and when the power is cut the system acts exactly like it would today, you lose the data in the memory but not all your data, the drive still retains its information.

Basically I want a hard drive that operates at RAM speeds. You do too. We all do. Why isn't it a thing yet though? Couldn't we put a lithium ion battery in there to retain data in case of power failure? And when the system is on it charges that l-ion battery?

It does exist. They're called hardware ramdisks and are eye searingly expensive enterprise hardware; primarily used to power large database servers (although SSDs have allowed a number of DBs servers to hit performance targets with cheaper flash storage).

You miss my point. A RAM disk still operates in the confines of the current bus system. I want a hybrid device that takes the responsibility of both the memory and the hard drive and puts it in one package, and when the power is cut the system acts exactly like it would today, you lose the data in the memory but not all your data, the drive still retains its information.

Basically I want a hard drive that operates at RAM speeds. You do too. We all do. Why isn't it a thing yet though? Couldn't we put a lithium ion battery in there to retain data in case of power failure? And when the system is on it charges that l-ion battery?

I'm pretty sure that at least some point, a physical ramdisk device existed, although I believe it was quite unpopular because it was ridiculously expensive and only served very niche uses.

Given how badly memory bandwidth constrained your average PC is, I would expect a reasonable improvement in framerate with faster memory. Not everything happens in the GPU, and something like Crysis is probably too big to fit in cache, so you're going to be hitting main memory a lot, slowing your framerate.

Of course if you dropped these modules into your current rig, you would see exactly 0 FPS difference because your memory controller can't support them.

I'll refer you to Google, Anandtech, and the impact of memory bandwidth on non-apu (which you are referencing) gaming performance. (generally less than margin of error)

If you are running Crysis on your APU, though, this stuff is what is really needed. Especially for AMD.

APUs (and CPUs with iGPUs in general) are a special case though as they basically use system memory for vRAM since they don't have access to a dedicated pool of vRAM like a discrete GPU does.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

Power goes out - data is lost.

Not what you'd expect from a disk drive.

And there's plenty of free tools to create a RAM disk if you really want it that bad.

You miss my point. A RAM disk still operates in the confines of the current bus system. I want a hybrid device that takes the responsibility of both the memory and the hard drive and puts it in one package, and when the power is cut the system acts exactly like it would today, you lose the data in the memory but not all your data, the drive still retains its information.

Basically I want a hard drive that operates at RAM speeds. You do too. We all do. Why isn't it a thing yet though? Couldn't we put a lithium ion battery in there to retain data in case of power failure? And when the system is on it charges that l-ion battery?

Not any sort of expert, but the memory subsystems in computers rely on very fast busses that have very finicky about how they are laid out and how the signals are timed. That sort of bus would be difficult to apply to a hard drive. The SSD is bridging this gap, allows much faster data access, but is more expensive. Apple has been putting their SSDs on faster buses than typical for a normal hard drive which also improves things, other companies have SSD on PCIe cards to achieve the same effect. The current hard drive buses are faster than a mechanical hard drive now so no need to put them on an even faster bus. To get faster than current hard drive buses you need to use multiple drives being written in parallel, at which point you can not fit them on the motherboard.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It is a cost-based reason, but not of the conspiracy you've described. Hard drives are dense but slow. Memory is expensive (ie, not dense) but fast. Also, the way memory works is that it needs constant voltage in order to maintain state, whereas hard disks, which are magnetic, hold their state for a long time even without energy input. What you describe is desirable but not yet quite feasible.

Would it be feasible with a constant, near guaranteed power source for the data, even if the mains is unplugged? As in, a battery that recharges itself while the system is on, gives warnings before it fails, and is easily replaced if it goes bad before your next upgrade?

I can't tell if you're being snarky in describing a UPS or if you legitimately don't know about UPSes.

I used to do this with an Amiga A500 back when having a 4mb on the side expansion port was a more cost effective alternative for me that buying a real hard drive. Lighting fast loading speeds when compared to floppy loading and disk swapping.

I used to do this with an Amiga A500 back when having a 4mb on the side expansion port was a more cost effective alternative for me that buying a real hard drive. Lighting fast loading speeds when compared to floppy loading and disk swapping.

ASUS even bundles software with their ROG boards that allow you to create a RAMDisk and then have the same software create symlinks so you can move files into the RAMdisk without losing their file structure. I've used it on a couple of Steam games I have, but sadly the game I'd love to use it on due it's ridiculously long load times (Shogun 2: Total War) is too big to fit into my RAM disk because the biggest the software will let me make it is 24GB. Which seems a little small given that I have 32GB.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It is a cost-based reason, but not of the conspiracy you've described. Hard drives are dense but slow. Memory is expensive (ie, not dense) but fast. Also, the way memory works is that it needs constant voltage in order to maintain state, whereas hard disks, which are magnetic, hold their state for a long time even without energy input. What you describe is desirable but not yet quite feasible.

Would it be feasible with a constant, near guaranteed power source for the data, even if the mains is unplugged? As in, a battery that recharges itself while the system is on, gives warnings before it fails, and is easily replaced if it goes bad before your next upgrade?

I can't tell if you're being snarky in describing a UPS or if you legitimately don't know about UPSes.

Yeah but those are large and intended to power the entire system.

Im talking about a cell phone sized battery that attaches to the drive and keeps the 1's and 0's in place when the power is cut from the mains. Something quite small that is only to be used to keep the ram side of things in place. That could perhaps bridge the gap until we had a better solution?

Edit- Not sure on power consumption of ddr these days, but it seems like my cell battery could keep that data intact for at least a week or more, in case the system went without power for a given amount of time. Hell the battery could even charge if it needed to while the system is off but plugged in. If battery degradation is an issue, put two of them in there.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It is a cost-based reason, but not of the conspiracy you've described. Hard drives are dense but slow. Memory is expensive (ie, not dense) but fast. Also, the way memory works is that it needs constant voltage in order to maintain state, whereas hard disks, which are magnetic, hold their state for a long time even without energy input. What you describe is desirable but not yet quite feasible.

Would it be feasible with a constant, near guaranteed power source for the data, even if the mains is unplugged? As in, a battery that recharges itself while the system is on, gives warnings before it fails, and is easily replaced if it goes bad before your next upgrade?

I can't tell if you're being snarky in describing a UPS or if you legitimately don't know about UPSes.

Yeah but those are large and intended to power the entire system.

Im talking about a cell phone sized battery that attaches to the drive and keeps the 1's and 0's in place when the power is cut from the mains. Something quite small that is only to be used to keep the ram side of things in place. That could perhaps bridge the gap until we had a better solution?

Enterprise SSDs already have something like this to flush their cache. However to flush something as large as you're talking about to a much slower mechanical drive would probably require something much larger than the typical capacitors they use in SSDs.

I used to do this with an Amiga A500 back when having a 4mb on the side expansion port was a more cost effective alternative for me that buying a real hard drive. Lighting fast loading speeds when compared to floppy loading and disk swapping.

Yeah, /dev/shm is on most GNU/Linux distros by default. It's pretty good for skipping around on large media files.

Why haven't we figured out a way to mix memory and a hard drive into one package yet? Is it for financial reasons, as in companies can bleed us of our money better by halting the march of progress?

It just makes sense to me that we should cut out the middle-man here and make a hard drive serve as memory in addition to storage. One less stop on the informations journey to its destination. Seems like that would make for a screaming fast system, whereas ddr4 is likely to have almost zero benefit to 95% of all pc users.

If I am wrong about this could someone explain why this is illogical?

It is a cost-based reason, but not of the conspiracy you've described. Hard drives are dense but slow. Memory is expensive (ie, not dense) but fast. Also, the way memory works is that it needs constant voltage in order to maintain state, whereas hard disks, which are magnetic, hold their state for a long time even without energy input. What you describe is desirable but not yet quite feasible.

Would it be feasible with a constant, near guaranteed power source for the data, even if the mains is unplugged? As in, a battery that recharges itself while the system is on, gives warnings before it fails, and is easily replaced if it goes bad before your next upgrade?

I can't tell if you're being snarky in describing a UPS or if you legitimately don't know about UPSes.

Yeah but those are large and intended to power the entire system.

Im talking about a cell phone sized battery that attaches to the drive and keeps the 1's and 0's in place when the power is cut from the mains. Something quite small that is only to be used to keep the ram side of things in place. That could perhaps bridge the gap until we had a better solution?

Enterprise SSDs already have something like this to flush their cache. However to flush something as large as you're talking about to a much slower mechanical drive would probably require something much larger than the typical capacitors they use in SSDs.

Aren't we still stuck with the same sata bus speeds though? 6gbps? I think this system I am typing on, it's ddr2 memory has a bandwidth of about 25GB per second currently.

The limitation for games like Crysis is 90% of the time your graphics card and its memory, not the memory in your machine.

So, if you want to get more FPS from Crysis, best thing to do is upgrade your power supply (most gaming-class graphics cards need at least a 400 watt power supply and most machines today come with a 300 watt) and graphics card.

Don't take your advice from this guy...

Seriously, a power supply for more fps? Do you work in a mine? What are you doing posting on Ars?

So you and (so far) 7 others don't know how to read? Do you work in a mine? Read his post again until you get it. Granted, he worded it badly and placed the PS ahead of the GFX card in his sentence structure. On the internets that pretty much guarantees that his point won't come across, as witnessed here.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.